Am I the only one who is completely sick of having to see effing Ron Paul a dozen times a day appear in my RSS feeds due to the Ron Paul Bots™ spamming Reddit & Digg with their useless dribble. Seriously - this guy is batshiat insane on the level of Lyndon LaRouche. I'm surprised as to how his merry band of crazy followers gathered enough intelligence to learn how to use this 'internet' thing.

Ron Paul’s views are a contradictory hodgepodge of conservative and libertarian positions. He opposed the Iraq War but supported Afghanistan. He’s strongly pro-life but vaguely pro-gay-marriage. It seems that he wants to withdraw from most international organizations, including the WTO and the U.N. Despite being “free trade,” he opposes NAFTA, CAFTA and every other free trade agreement the U.S. has signed. He is anti-tax, anti-government spending and wishes to return to the gold standard. Paul distrusts the Federal Reserve, blaming it for causing inflation. His view of the separation church and state is worrisome, arguing that a “rigid separation...has no basis.” What is most concerning is that he’s content to let genocide, wars of aggression, and human rights violations occur abroad with nothing more than a “moral statement” from the U.S.

One of the main planks of Ron Paul’s Presidential platform is the long-awaited elimination of the income tax. Paul claims that he can eliminate the income tax, pull us out of all international activities (and eliminate some small pieces of the federal government like the Department of Education) and thereby save the world. Or something. Someone smarter than us runs the numbers after the jump.

Michael Dobbs at the Washington Post (hopefully for him, no relation to Lou) asked Ron Paul’s campaign to let him know how the miracle of income tax elimination could be accomplished without functionally crippling our government (not realizing, perhaps, that for many anti-tax advocates that that’s the point!). The individual income tax brings in $1.2 trillion (of the $2.6 trillion the government takes in overall). If he doesn’t plan on borrowing to make up the budget gap, which he says he doesn’t, then he has to find $1.2 trillion in savings. All the budget cuts Ron Paul proposes? Add up to $280 billion according to Dobbs’ (and the federal government’s) figures.